Social media is a powerful tool to utilize as it can connect brands and people in a way that was not possible in the past. It allows you to market your brand and also interact with customers. PowerPoint has helped me present my company’s social media strategy, by creating an engaging presentation that connects your audience.
This presentation will acquaint you with all aspects of a complete Social Media Strategy. We will also look at what is most important and the order in which to do things. You’ll learn how to measure and report your Social Media efforts, as well as tips on what platforms work best for you and why.
Identify Target Audiences
Do you have a defined target audience associated with your goals? Having clarity on your most valuable and important customer types precedes this step. If marketing, sales, and service haven’t had that discussion yet, start there. For the purpose of social media strategy planning, there are three main audience groups we care about reaching:
1. Your most valuable customers.
Focus on your MVP (Most Valuable Personas) for your primary goal. Building a better relationship with this audience—and attracting more like them—will drive the greatest return from your social media investment.
You might find this part challenging. Brands often have multiple customer segments they speak to across product lines. And while social advertising lends itself well to micro-targeting multiple personas, it’s hard to grow an audience organically and implement a content strategy speaking to lots of different people.
So while your business may want to recruit employees, attract customers, and engage with influencers—your primary content and channel strategy should be formed from your most valuable prospects and customers.
2. Your aspirational audience.
This segment represents the audience you want to grow into next. This group might be important for business growth in the next 5 years. Often it’s a younger generation you hope to influence, or consumers of an emerging business segment. They might not be an immediate priority, but they should be identified and understood.
3. Your influencer audience.
The segment who can lift up your brand and reach your customers. Who influences your customer? Defining this group can be key to unlocking earned media and traffic. Note: You can swap “customer” with the designation that makes sense – client, donor, guest, or member.
Next, dig into the details of your customer persona. Once you’ve confirmed your target audiences (congrats on being decisive!), the next step is to describe them at a deeper level. The better you know your audience, the more effective your content strategy will be in engaging them. To define your persona, ask questions like:
- What are their (relevant) goals, motivations, pain points, and questions?
- How would you describe them demographically?
- How would you describe their lifestyle, personality traits, values, and attitudes?
- How else would they describe themselves as an audience?
All of your juicy content ideas will come from the answers to these questions, so it’s important to get authentic, qualitative feedback—ideally from your customers themselves. For additional reading, our friends at Optimist provide more questions to consider when building out a buyer persona.
To recap: First, identify your most valuable, aspirational, and influencer audience segments. Then ask yourself and key members of your organization:
- What are their (relevant) goals and challenges?
- Which attributes describe them as an audience?
- How else would they describe themselves?
Get to know your competition
Odds are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing.
Conduct a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.
It will also help you spot opportunities.
Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into Twitter or Instagram. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.
Use social media listening
Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors.
Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them.
Pro tip: Use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to set up listening streams to monitor relevant keywords and accounts in real-time.
As you track, you may notice shifts in the way channels are used. Or, you might spot a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs.
Use this kind of intel to inform your own social media marketing strategy.
Jazz up your profiles with a diverse content strategy.
People respond to good imagery, fun videos, and some interesting podcasts once and awhile. Jazz up your content by using this type of media regularly. Your social media pages will look bland if all you post and share is text, so be sure to use other types of media to catch your audience’s eye. This is also a great way to add a level of personality to your brand.
Use brand advocates.
Your best promotional tool is the people who love your brand. Instead of focusing all your efforts on finding new customers, why not leverage your current ones? In addition to your current customers, you could use your own employees. To use your employees as brand advocates, you should:
- Create social media guidelines specific to your brand.
- Tell your advocates about social media best practices.
- Add a leader to each section of your social media advocacy plan.
- Track the correct data to pinpoint areas for improvement and those that are doing well.
Conclusion
Be prepared for anything. Know your content and the associated settings for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from an SEO perspective. This presentation includes an overview of content usage, social media platforms, business objectives. It also includes planning, design, content integration and publishing as well as measurement and accountability.